Weekly development update - 6th September

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We're at the end of week 6 of our latest development cycle and we've completed some really exciting work. This is going to be a bit of a bumper update so grab a cup of tea and let's dive in.

Rooms layout

We have updated the layout of Rooms and we think they look brilliant and we hope you do too. The reason for this change was to make it clear that Rooms are a completely separate feature to Channels and to make it even easier for users to start conversations and see the latest activity.

At first you'll see that we've created a new button in the banner so that you can start a conversation straight away, rather than having to go into the conversations tab. We've also moved the Activity | Content | Conversations tabs into their own row which will allow us to add and move features as the Rooms feature develops.

We've also updated the conversations view; previously conversations were shunted across the screen making it hard to read the title or clearly see who had responded. We've removed the 'about this room' section from this page which has released the space to add more conversation filtering modules in the future.

SEO title tag and description

We've added a new dropdown option to the right-hand menu when you're writing a post. This has three open text boxes and looks like this;

The SEO title allows you to change the title that appears in the tab at the top of your browser. You might do this if you have an abstract title and want the SEO title to more accurately describe the content of the article. This title tag is also tracked by Google so try to add keywords that will make your content more searchable.

For example, Charles recently wrote this fantastic piece 'Gamification is a gimmick, engagement is not' whereas i might change the SEO title to 'Community gamification and engagement'. It's less journalistic but it contains the keyword community.

The SEO description is the equivalent of the introduction to your content. Similar to the SEO title this should be used to write a more succinct keyword-driven description to your work. Often this is picked up by Google as the blurb on the search results page, however this depends on what search terms are used.

The canonical URL should be used if you've copied the content wholesale from another site. For example, if you've written a blog on your personal site and then copied it across to your Zapnito profile then you should put the URL of your personal site in this box. This is so that Google will recognise these two pages as one piece of work, rather than duplications which often get penalised.

Organisation address

We have added a new field on the general settings page called Organisation Address.

This is a legal requirement so when you have a moment please go and fill it in with the registered address of your company. The address will then pre-fill into the footer of your site and into any newsletter/digest/notification emails that are sent from the platform.

Bugs

We've squashed loads of bugs in this last week of the cycle so here's a quick run down of what's been done. Don't forget that if you ever see anything that doesn't seem right on your site just drop us a line at support@zapnito.com and we'll investigate it for you.

Courses - We've added documents to courses. Previously you could only have posts and video as course material whereas now you can add pdf documents and slideshows.

Google+ - We've caught up with the times and removed Google+ as an option for integration.

Scheduler - Some customers were reporting that the content scheduler was appearing 1 day off which was making content planning quite tricky. This has now been solved and all content will be going out on the right day.

Internet Explorer 11 - We've updated how we support different internet browsers we can now run on IE11. If you or your users are on IE11 you'll now be able to render all document and slideshow content.

Save to pdf - The option to 'save to pdf' was showing on pdf document content which was causing some confusion - how do you create a pdf of a pdf! We've removed this button now, and don't forget if you want to download the document just click on the icon at the top of the document box;

I have worked in the publishing industry for 8 years in academic journals and corporate publications, developing expertise across a variety of subjects from print logistics to content marketing. Please get in touch with any questions and I hope to be able to help you develop a successful Zapnito community.

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